Posted on 09/20/2005 5:25:41 AM PDT by OESY
...The president called it a "positive step" and not much more, pointing out that "the question is, over time, will all parties adhere to the agreement."
Translation: I'm not betting the ranch on this one holding up.
Even so, what happened here is a stunning and unexpected vindication of the Bush administration approach to the North Korean problem. The famously go-it-alone, unilateralist United States has spent three years working with five other nations to bring North Korea to its senses.
This approach was treated with withering scorn by Democrats last year, in particular by John Kerry, who described the Bush policy as "one of the greatest abdications of foreign policy that I've seen in all the years that I've been in the Senate. . . . They've handled it miserably. Abysmally."
Kerry and other Democrats wanted to give the North Koreans what they wanted — to treat them as though they were the Soviet Union reborn and negotiate with them one-on-one. "We should have been engaged in bilateral negotiations from the get-go, from the beginning," he said in 2003. "And it was obvious that when you announce a policy of pre-emption and you invade another country, and you begin to build bunker-busting nuclear weapons, that Kim Jong Il was going to find a way to get the attention of this administration and he did."
Kerry's contention that the Bush administration's conduct somehow caused the North Koreans to abrogate its 1994 deal with the United States was contemptibly absurd. The CIA was warning as early as 1995 that the North Koreans were violating the "agreed framework" the Clinton administration had worked out with Pyongyang. By 1999, Clinton's onetime defense secretary, William Perry, declared: "What they're doing is moving forward on their nuclear weapons."...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
JK: "I was for the unilateralist strategy before I was against the unilateralist strategy.
They basically walked out of the room after the talks and stated that they expect us to give them nuclear reactors- deal is over already.
Kerry's "all my years" add up to 1 & 1/2.
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